I’m a rough intermediate at modeling. I wouldn’t say I’m an awesome pro, capable of astounding things (yet), I’m not exactly a stark noob, either. I’m in that in between place.
What I am a noob at is Blender, which I decided to pick up an learn cuz…well…it’s kinda become really good over the last year or so. Normally I use Modo, but the appeal of an editor that’s about 85% as nice, but 100% free is too much of a temptation to pass up.
Okay, life story aside, I’ve got a UVing question. In Modo, my UV maps are displayed in a list off to the right. I can look at them without having to select the adjoining mesh. This is the opposite of Blender, where I have to select a face to see it’s UVed geometry on the sheet.
The handy thing about it is that if I’ve got some weird piece of UVed geometry floating about on my sheet, and I have no idea what it goes to, all I have to do is select it, and it’ll highlight the geometry both on the sheet and the model itself. Handy stuff.
Now this is important because I’m Uving a little semi simple building to come to terms with Blender’s style of doing things. Long story short, I edited some of the geo on my model, and had to reunwrap a piece to get it looking right again on the sheet. I ended up with this one mysterious orphaned island that just kinda floating around. I can’t just highlight it to figure out what it is. So I’ve got two questions.
Is there a way to select a UV and see it’s connected to on the mesh?
Is there a way to edit and/or delete UVed geometry off the sheet? If I make a small change to the main mesh, it seems a little over complicated having to reunwrap a surface and scale it to size just because it’s got an extra edge the main geometry no longer has.
I’ve looked around a bit, but haven’t found an answer to this yet, so I figured I’d bug you all here.
UVs dont exist in the image editor that are not on the object. If you delete some part of mesh it disappears from the image editor. It is best to avoid editing the mesh after unwrapping. Some tools can be used with care to add geometry - loop cut for example will work, with the caveat we cannot slide the loop until enabling “Correct UVs” which is available after confirming a ctrl + E edge slide operation for example.
Excellent! Thanks! I don’t like the fact I can’t delete UV islands, because I seem to have picked up a stray piece that keeps getting in my way, but I can just move it out of the way and continue doing my thing so it’s not a huge deal.
Got another question for you. Right now I’m unwrapping a series of pillars attached to my building, and I want to minimize distortion as much as I can. I’ve got three done. One already fixed, tweaked, and scaled to size, and two freshly unwrapped…
I don’t want to have to go through that whole fixing process for every one of my pillars. UVing is tedious enough as it is. So I’m wondering if there’s a way I can get Blender to just fold the shape out without distorting it as much as it is? I’ve already tried the other unwrapping options, but none of them give me the results I want.
If you properly mark seams around a part and then select-unwrap, and tweaking it in tools panel, you should get a fine result.
Another method can be the ‘Follow active Quads’ way: you select a quad from those you have to unwrap, make its UVs squared to match proportions of the polygon in the mesh, then Shift select all the other polygons to unwrap and do Unwrap -> Follow active Quads.
EDIT: the formerly unwrapped polygon must be the active one before calling Follow active quads, so the last selected one.
Out of sheer interest there is a quick test of such unwrap. Blender does it just fine. But, yes, you need to add seams to ‘cut’ out windows and doors from wall. Add some more to properly deal with them too.
Now, for such squares mostly, you need to choose Conformal method on T-panel or F6 right after Unwrap command.
Man, thanks for suggesting mark seams to me. Modo doesn’t have anything like that, and it’s absolutely awesome. Follow active quads seems to be kinda halfway there, though I can’t seem to be able to get it to work the way I want it to 100% of the time. It’s sorta hit and miss.
Though I’m still in about the same boat. I marked all the seams on my model (plus or minus a few I need to go back and fix) and did a mas unwrap. It came out…alright, but still kinda sloppy. Doing a select unwrap still produces the same results as doing the whole thing at once, save I get a bigger island.
It’s…eh…decent. A little too sloppy still. That’d take at least a good hour and a half of really, really, really tedious work to fix up, and I want to try to minimize that as much as I can The only other slightly quicker option would be to make more seams, and start stitching the islands together on the sheet.
Any more hints or tips I can try out?
edit: Eppo, I’ll give that a whirl and see how it does.
…I think I’ve got enough to figure out how to unwrap the rest of my model and get it ready for PS. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve got a couple more dumb questions waiting in the wings, so I’ll probably be back.
When you do the unwrap, check the bottom of the toolshelf (“T” key) for the unwrap options (also available via F6). If “Method” is set to Angle Based, change it to Conformal, which is better for rectilinear objects like these.
Sabba, I had it set to angle based. Not that I would’ve known, because I don’t have the toolshelf up on my UV layout. I’m trying to set everything up to sorta look like what I’m used to, and I’m starting to think I’m missing out on a few important things by doing that.
Yeah, I noticed from your screenshot that you didn’t have the toolshelf open. I suggest you keep it and the properties shelf (N-key) open until you’re familiar with what they contain. Then you can open them when you need 'em. If your screen is getting crowded, remember that Shift-Spacebar will maximize and restore the active window. And as I said, you can always get properties for the currently-active action with F6.
